Rebecca Mclain

Portland State University | PSU · Institute for Sustainable Solutions

Politiikkasuositus 2023: Globaalisti vastuullista, paikallisesti vuorovaikutteista. Demokratian puolustaminen on nykyisessä monikriisisessä ja kroonisen epävarmuuden sävyttämässä maailmantilassa entistäkin tärkeämpää. Ympäristöhallinnan eri tasoilla ja tavoilla tulisi varmistaa, että kansalaisilla on mahdollisuus oikeudenmukaiseen ja merkitykselli...

RNRG-research group Policy Brief 2023. The current global context is characterized by poly-crises and chronic uncertainty; thus, it is crucial to protect and promote democratic practices and values. We consider responsive and collaborative governance a mean to support these values through the fair and meaningful involvement of various actors in de...

Health benefits of outdoor recreation have been broadly demonstrated and land managers recognize the equity implications of providing safe and inclusive outdoor spaces. Data on public lands visitation and outdoor participation show that Hispanic recreationists are less likely to engage in outdoor leisure than White persons. Early studies of outdoor...

Multiple global initiatives are underway to restore the world’s forests, and more recently, its rangeland ecosystems. Tenure security has been identified as a key enabling factor for successful restoration initiatives. However, in Madagascar, a global biodiversity hotspot, dry forests are considered unoccupied and unowned, even where communities ha...

National forest roads allow access to public lands providing connections to natural and cultural heritage. Planning processes that address potential road closures or conversions can be highly contentious. Public participatory GIS (PPGIS) has been used as a tool to gather information for environmental planning and decision-making. Our PPGIS approach...

We demonstrate how Baynes et al.’s (Glob Environ Change 35:226–238, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.09.011) framework can be operationalized as a tool for identifying potential intervention points for supporting the tenure and governance-enabling environment for CFEs. We do so by applying the framework to a sample of CFUG-managed CFE...

With communities in many parts of the world achieving stronger, legally recognized, collective rights over their forests and other natural resources, important questions arise regarding how communities can overcome perceived barriers to investment and deliver sustainable development. Normative economic theory posits conceptual and practical barrier...

1) Investment in commons comes primarily from donors, governments and communities, but private sector investment is increasing. 2) Commons-based investment readiness is conditional on the level of assurance stakeholders have that the obligations of each party will be met. Investment readiness develops over time and in stages, as levels of assurance...

We examined traditional knowledge of fire use by the Ichishikin (Sahaptin), Kitsht Wasco (Wasco), and Numu (Northern Paiute) peoples (now Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, CTWS) in the eastside Cascades of Oregon to generate insights for restoring conifer forest landscapes and enhancing culturally-valued resources. We examined qualitative and ge...

Decision support tools have been shown to encourage the development of shared mental models about ecosystem dynamics when they are used in collaborative processes that bring together technical experts and other stakeholders on a regular basis over an extended period. However, when a diverse set of stakeholders is involved in environmental planning,...

Impact investors typically finance businesses that seek to challenge the status quo, valuing environmental and social outcomes to deliver more sustainable returns on investment. Microfinance institutions such as Grameen and FINCA lead the way in financing poor and marginalized groups. Now, however, increasing attention is being given to help invest...

The Bonn Challenge, a voluntary global initiative launched in 2011, aims to bring up to 350 million hectares of degraded land into some level of restorative state by 2030. Pilot forest landscape restoration (FLR) efforts indicate that enhancing community and smallholder tenure rights is critical for achieving FLR's desired joint environmental and s...

Our paper describes the application of a realist approach to synthesizing evidence from 31 articles examining the environmental outcomes of marine protected areas governed under different types of property regimes. The development of resource tenure interventions that promote sustainable management practices has been challenged by the difficulties...

This article uses research about non-timber forest products (NTFP) gathering in Seattle, Washington, USA to examine how people gain access to natural resources in urban environments. Our analysis focuses on gathering in three spaces: parks, yards, and public rights of way. We present a framework for conceptualizing access, and highlight cognitive m...

Landscape values mapping has been widely employed as a form of public participation GIS (PPGIS) in natural resource planning and decision-making to capture the complex array of values, uses, and interactions between people and landscapes. A landscape values typology has been commonly employed in the mapping of social and environmental values in a v...

Indigenous peoples, local communities, and other groups can use counter-mapping to make land claims, identify areas of desired access, or convey cultural values that diverge from the dominant paradigm. While sometimes created independently, counter-maps also can be formulated during public participation mapping events sponsored by natural resource...

Highlights: The effectiveness of participatory GIS approaches at engaging different publics was explored. Online surveys engaged urbanites; community workshops engaged rural residents. Urban and rural residents went to similar places but engaged in different activities. Use of multiple data collection methods will broaden public engagement. Mapping...

Cities play a pivotal but paradoxical role in the future of our planet. As world leaders and citizens grapple with the consequences of growth, pollution, climate change, and waste, urban sustainability has become a ubiquitous catchphrase and a beacon of hope. Yet, we know little about how the concept is implemented in daily life - particularly with...

Through a discussion of urban foraging in Seattle, Washington, USA, we examine how people’s plant and mushroom harvesting practices in cities are linked to relationships with species, spaces, and ecologies. Bringing a relational approach to political ecology, we discuss the ways that these particular nature–society relationships are formed, legitim...

In order to inform natural resource policy and land management decisions, landscape values mapping (LVM) is increasingly used to collect data about the meanings that people attach to places and the activities associated with those places. This type of mapping provides geographically referenced data on areas of high density of values or associated w...

Recent “green” planning initiatives envision food production, including urban agriculture and livestock production, as desirable elements of sustainable cities. We use an integrated urban political ecology and human–plant geographies framework to explore how foraging for “wild” foods in cities, a subversive practice that challenges prevailing views...

Values mapping that represents how humans associate with natural environments is useful for several purposes, including recognizing and addressing different perceptions of natural resource ownership and management priorities, documenting traditional ecological knowledge, and spatially identifying the public's perception of economic and non-economic...

Ecosystem-based planning and management have stimulated the need to gather sociocultural values and human uses of land in formats accessible to diverse planners and researchers. Human Ecology Mapping (HEM) approaches offer promising spatial data gathering and analytical tools, while also addressing important questions about human-landscape connecti...

Non-industrial private forest owners in 16 states were surveyed about their interest in learning about managing their land for nontimber forest products. T-tests of means, Mann-Whitney U-tests, and crosstabulations identified land tenure, resource management, and socio-demographic characteristics associated with interest in nontimber forest product...

Urban forests are multifunctional socio-ecological landscapes, yet some of their social benefits remain poorly understood. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence from Seattle, Washington to demonstrate that urban forests contain nontimber forest products that contribute a variety of wild foods, medicines, and materials for the wellbeing of urban...

Ecosystem-based planning and management have stimulated the need to gather sociocultural values and human uses of land in formats accessible to diverse planners and researchers. Human Ecology Mapping (HEM) approaches offer promising spatial data gathering and analytical tools, while also addressing important questions about human-landscape connecti...

This guide will provide landowners like yourself information on how to conduct a basic inventory of nontimber forest products on your land and digitally map your data. You can use free, widely available digital mapping tools that are increasingly a part of everyday life. A glossary of key terms is provided at the end of this guide. After learning s...

Background/Question/Methods Participatory mapping approaches have been developed by social scientists to depict human ecological systems at various spatial scales. Baseline socio-spatial data are needed for natural resource planning and decision-making, yet few tools exist to collect social values data or integrate socio-spatial data with biophys...

The past decade has seen resurgence in interest in gathering wild plants and fungi in cities. In addition to gathering by individuals, dozens of groups have emerged in U.S., Canadian, and European cities to facilitate access to nontimber forest products (NTFPs), particularly fruits and nuts, in public and private spaces. Recent efforts within citie...

Uncertainty, in its many manifestations, is a central factor in the management of complex systems, whether environmental (van der Sluijs 2007), climatic (Risbey and Kandlikar 2007), medical, or financial (McDaniel and Driebe 2005). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the management of ecosystems heavily affected by human use. True to the characte...

Products from the wild, also known as non-timber forest products (NTFPs), are used as medicines, foods, spices, fibers, and fuel and for a multitude of other purposes. They contribute substantially to rural livelihoods and generate revenue for companies and governments, and their use has a range of impacts on biodiversity conservation. However, thr...

Determining the economic value of these harvests is usually difficult and economic valuation methods are in their infancy. Traditional commodity tracking systems, such as national trade databases, list few if any wild fungi species and on-theground tracking systems are typically insufficient where they exist at all. One notable example is the trade...

Multi-stakeholder public participation is widely held to be crucial to the success of environmental problem solving (Dietz 2008). The use of computer-based decision support systems (DSS) is increasingly prevalent in these planning processes (NRC 2007) because of the complexity of the problems. Using salmonid recovery planning in the Columbia Basin...

A policy brief focused on laws and policies for more equitable and sustainable non-timber forest product use

Constructing a Wild Mushroom Panopticon: The Extension of Nation-State Control over the Forest Understory in Oregon, USA. For most of the 20th century, wild mushrooms on national forests in the United States fell under a de facto open-access management regime. As consumer demand for wild mushrooms increased, a nation-state wild mushroom management...

This paper examines the relation between public land management policy, amenity migration, and socioeconomic well-being using the case of the Northwest Forest Plan—a forest management policy that caused 11.6 million acres of federal land in the US Pacific Northwest to be reallocated from commodity production to biodiversity services. Our analysis f...

Implementation of ecosystem management projects has created a demand for socioeconomic assessments to predict or evaluate the impacts of ecosystem policies. Social scientists for these assessments face challenges that, while not unique to such projects, are more likely to arise than in smaller scale ones. This article summarizes lessons from our ex...

In this paper, we explore how modeling tools used in the multi-stakeholder process for salmon recovery in the Columbia River basin implicitly frame strategic planning so as to exclude other perspectives such as backcasting and the Precautionary Principle. Introduction. In the Columbia River basin, a complex multi-stakeholder process is underway to...

This report synthesizes the literature on the role of informal economic activity in the United States postindustrial economy. Informal economic activity is expanding in the United States and is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. The formal and informal economic sectors are inextricably intertwined, with individuals and households combini...

"Morels are prized edible mushrooms that fruit, sometimes prolifically, in many forest types throughout western North America. They are collected for personal consumption and commercially harvested as valuable special (nontimber) forest products. Large gaps remain, however, in our knowledge about their taxonomy, biology, ecology, cultivation, safet...

The socioeconomic monitoring report addresses two evaluation questions posed in the Northwest Forest Plan (the Plan) Record of Decision and assesses progress in meeting five Plan socioeconomic goals. Volume I of the report contains key findings. Volume II addresses the question, Are predictable levels of timber and nontimber resources available and...

This volume focuses on the Northwest Forest Plan (the Plan) record of decision (ROD) evaluation question, Are local communities and economies experiencing positive or negative changes that may be associated with federal forest management? It also assesses how well two of the Plan's socioeconomic goals were met during the first decade: (1) to mainta...

This study provides an overview of nontimber forest products (NTFP) programs on national forests in the United States. We conducted an email survey in 2003 to obtain data on NTFP management activities on national forests across the country. Program characteristics examined in the study included important NTFPs managed on national forests, presence...

This exploratory study examined aspects of the social organization of the commercial wild morel industry in western Montana during 2001. We talked with 18 key informants (7 buyers and 11 pickers) and observed social interactions at one buying station near the Kootenai National Forest and three buying stations near the Bitterroot National Forest. Th...

This document explores the potential of collaborative approaches for nontimber forest product inventory and monitoring in the United States. It begins by reviewing results of a federal and state survey that documented inventory and monitoring efforts for nontimber forest products in the United States. The surveys show that the majority of NTFP-rela...